Day 32 – Trip Complete

We awoke from our last nice hotel stay and enjoyed our final fancy hotel breakfast of the trip. The buffet was great – again with smoked salmon, plenty of cooked options, meats and cheeses, muesli, and pastries. We sat outside at a table by the infinity pool and watched the ocean and a submarine emerged and there were drills being conducted. Wanting to maximize our hotel stay, we again waited until noon to check out and departed for our short ride to Lisbon.

The ride was flat, fast, and on fancy roads (well paved, with nice buildings and communities along the majority of the coastline to Lisbon). I got a flat tire halfway (failed patch), but quickly fixed and we were on our way. The final kilometers of Lisbon weren’t great – with bumpy cobbled road and roadworks, but it was exciting to pass some famous sights, like the Padrao dos Descobrimentos (a memorial to sailors) and the Arco da Rua Augusta (a big entrance arch to the city).

We arrived at our hotel, where we’d stay three nights (50 EUR / night). The manager looked furious about our bikes, saying we couldn’t bring them into the room and begrudgingly let us store them in the secured basement area. We were friendly and the tension was diffused after much use of google translate. The room was far better than we expected – we had a room with a double bed, a separate room with a single bed, and a balcony (for the price and description we expected it to be like our tiny Porto room).

I then got to work trying to source bike boxes, which was quite a bit of work. I called ~7 different bike shops, none with any available (and some saying that I was the fourth person who had called that day asking for a box). I sent messages to multiple people on warmshowers. One guy, Ruben, wasn’t in Lisbon, but invited me to a whatsapp group chat with 300 cyclists, who I messaged. The next day I heard back from Daniel, a bike shop owner, who had a spare box. Another, Joao, was incredibly helpful, wasn’t even living in the center, but drove around a couple bike shops in the suburbs, found two boxes, and drove them to us. We treated him to dinner, where Viki got Porco Alentejana and he convinced me to try sardines (tricky to eat, filled with bones and guts to avoid, but fun to try). One of the bike boxes ultimately didn’t work (it was massive, had been for an electric bike, we ballparked well over 300 linear cm, with the airline maximum being 280cm), but had plenty of useful packing material.